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Electricity = keeps you warm, cooks your food, powers your devices. Cryptos = suck that energy out of the power grid to gamble with one another.
Wouldn't it make more sense to just let the price of electricity go up?
Maybe it would make more sense to you, but not to most people I think. Electricity has much better uses than cryptocurrency.
Oh wait. That's exactly what "cost" is.
Electricity = keeps you warm, cooks your food, powers your devices. Cryptos = suck that energy out of the power grid to gamble with one another.
> Electricity = keeps you warm Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that?
A heat pump is more than twice as efficient as direct heat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Electricity = keeps you warm Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that?
My heater doesn't become less effective each year, requiring replacement. While ASIC concretely implies this, GPU is not excluded if you want to remain competitive (read: generating profit)
Crypto mining hardware is >100% efficient, as it's exactly as efficient as an electric heater, but also generates revenue. Over time, others make more efficient crypto mining hardware, reducing the yield from yours. This causes your "efficiency" to gradually reduce down to 100%, but no lower.
However, nowadays we have heat pumps, which are also more efficient than our 100% benchmark, and produce additional useful heat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All big scale BTC mines buy at industrial prices. You cannot run a mine bigger than what your wiring can support in your apartment. None of them is using the subsidised residential rate.
Are industrial prices not subsidized?
Electricity = keeps you warm, cooks your food, powers your devices. Cryptos = suck that energy out of the power grid to gamble with one another.
> Electricity = keeps you warm Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that?
I have not recently done the math, but I'm pretty sure in my area its still more economically efficient to heat my home with natural gas than resistive heat. Obviously, emissions are a concern, future price uncertainty of fossil fuels, etc. Not the best way forward.
However, heat pumps in my area can make a ton of sense. They're far more efficient than resistive heating as long as it doesn't get practically arctic cold outside. When in decent climates they're about as economically efficient than a gas furnace.
In other words, mining crypto for heat isn't necessarily the most economical thing to do. It may just be better for you to use a heat pump and put your savings into buying crypto if ultimately having crypto and being warm is your goal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Electricity = keeps you warm Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that?
Crypto miners are pretty inefficient at heating your home. A heat pump is more than twice as efficient as direct heat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it would make more sense to you, but not to most people I think. Electricity has much better uses than cryptocurrency.
Of course it does. It also has better uses than say gaming, so if that is the logic maybe that should be banned, too.
Wouldn't it make more sense to just let the price of electricity go up?
A challenge might be in effective tax collection, but it isn't that hard to find heavy electricity consumers.